Verifying Erlang OTP installation

Installing Rebar

In addition to Erlang OTP, you’ll also need Rebar, a build tool that helps compile and test Erlang applications. The easiest way to install it on your machine is to download its sources and build it locally:

Congratulations! You now have a self-contained script called "rebar" in your current working directory. Place this script anywhere in your path and you can use rebar to build OTP-compliant apps.

Setting up IntelliJ IDEA

Now when Erlang OTP and Rebar are set up, it’s time to download and install IntelliJ IDEA. Keep in mind, that for Erlang development you can use IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition (which is free and open-source).

Once the IDE is up and you see its Welcome screen, go to Configure | Plugins, then click Browse repositories, locate the Erlang plugin and install it:

After installing the plugin, restart IntelliJ IDEA.

Configuring an Erlang SDK

One more thing you’ll have to do to configure IntelliJ IDEA is to add an Erlang SDK.

To do that, change the structure of the default project. Open the default project structure in one of the two ways:

After that you’ll be asked to specify the name of your project and its directory. The following image shows the resulting Erlang project with the name ErlangDemo:

Creating a Rebar project

Instead of a pure Erlang project, you might want to create a Rebar project. To do that, type the following code at the Terminal prompt:

rebar create-app appid=<project name>

Once the project has been created, import it into IntelliJ IDEA to make it possible to open this project in the IDE.

Importing a project into IntelliJ IDEA

You can import a project into IntelliJ IDEA in several ways. Let's explore importing from the Welcome screen.

To import an existing project into IntelliJ IDEA, click Import on the Welcome Screen, and choose the project directory. IntelliJ IDEA offers you to either import the project from existing sources, or from an external model (a build file).

When importing a Rebar project, make sure to enable the option Fetch dependencies with rebar:

Running and debugging an application

To run an application, you have to create a run/debug configuration created against the stub Erlang Application. To do this, on the main menu choose Run | Edit Configurations, select the stub Erlang Application, specify the name (here it is hello.hello_world), and specify the application’s module and function:

After that you’ll be able to run your application via the main menu (Run | Run <run configuration name>, the toolbar (), or a even a shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+F10).

Once you have a run/debug configuration, you can also debug your application via the main menu (Run | Debug ‘<run configuration name>, the toolbar (), or a shortcut (Shift+F9):

Additional

Learning Erlang

Learning IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA is a Java IDE in the first place, however it’s also a platform and IDE for other languages, such as Erlang, Python, Ruby, PHP, and many other. To learn more about IntelliJ IDEA, it’s worth checking out the section Discover IntelliJ IDEA and watch the Video Tutorials.

If you have a question, you can always ask it on StackOverflow (probably it’s already answered).